Post-911 Heartland Horror by Victoria McCollum

Author:Victoria McCollum [McCollum, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317077534
Google: 1Gd9DAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-06-23T05:10:46+00:00

4 Malev(i)olence, malevolence and misogyny

9/11, gender, torture and McKee’s The Woman (2011)

Infamous American country musician Charlie Daniels (2003, p.11) admitted to being driven to ‘madness’ by the ‘pseudo-highbrow supposedly intellectual outfits’ that scrutinised the Bush administration’s response to the attacks on 9/11. For Daniels (ibid., p.11), pointing to the deprivation of the Iraqi people was just shy of utter stupidity as ‘unspeakable’ monsters, such as Saddam Hussein, ‘indulge their every whim’. The musician also rigorously condemned the ‘pampered, overpaid [and] unrealistic’ of society for dampening the public spirit towards the ‘mandatory’ ‘War on Terror’ (ibid., p.15). As Daniels not-so-eloquently put it, ‘Why, you bunch of pitiful, hypocritical, idiotic, spoiled mugwumps. Get your heads out of the sand and smell the Twin Towers burning!’

Chapter 1 referred to a number of anger-stricken responses that American country music had toward 9/11, as epitomised by Toby’s Keith’s defiantly patriotic ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)’ (2002). In like manner, the lyrics to Charlie Daniels’ post-9/11 song, ‘This Ain’t No Rag, It’s A Flag’ (2001), pledged to seize, and severely punish, the United States’ enemies. Naturally, sentiments of anger and even violence materialised from the nation’s emotional response to the initial trauma (Murphy 2007, p.92). Collective feelings of antagonism and outrage do commonly transpire during turbulent cultural times. Following the attacks, alongside the controversial dynamics of ‘memorial mania’, resentment was energised in the United States (Doss 2010, p.327).

While American anger has recently been considered a likely product of an overzealous and highly contrived national news industry (ibid., p.327), it is commonly understood as a legitimate and justifiable sentiment and an honest expression of human emotion. Historically speaking, anger in the United States has progressively empowered the persecuted, stirred the spineless and unleashed inspiration (Wood 2006, p.191). There is very good reason why the curbing of this emotional response is regarded as a lack of conviction as anger serves as a means to right wrongdoing, but it also ultimately demands retribution.

For Critchley (2007, p.130), anger is the ‘first political emotion’, an affective response that demands action, an ‘emotion that produces motion’. Anger can thus be framed in an ethical sense and as a genuinely rational sentiment of contemporary political life in which practical solutions can be provoked by a deep sense of injustice. It could be argued, therefore, that the rhetoric of anger can be employed to bolster ideologies and agendas in the political world, ‘a world of fictions’ according to Critchley (in Marovich 2012, n.p.), if the political masking was imbued with just enough faux integrity.

With regards to how anger is framed, expressed and perceived, it surely exists on a continuum, with at one end, a perfect integrity (which never exists in pure form) and, at the other end, anger becomes ideologically masked as something else, such as retribution. What appears to differentiate unjustifiable, and just, anger is an interval of postponement, or, according to Seneca (1995, p.29), a delay, which should be granted at first, ‘not in order that it may pardon the offence, but that it may form a right judgment about it’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.